A visionary and opinionated work of graphic nonfiction on the media and its discontents.
Nearly one million weekly listeners trust NPR's Brooke Gladstone to guide them through the distortions and complexities of the modern media. This brilliant radio personality now bursts onto the page as an illustrated character in vivid comics drawn by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld. The cartoon of Brooke conducts the reader through two millennia of history-from the newspapers in Caesar's Rome to the penny press of the American Revolution and the manipulations of contemporary journalism. Gladstone's manifesto debunks the notion that "The Media" is an external force, outside of our control, since we've begun directly constructing, filtering, and responding to what we watch and read. With fascinating digressions, sobering anecdotes, and brave analytical wit, The Influencing Machine equips us to be smart, savvy, informed consumers and shapers of the media. It shows that we have met the media and it is us. So now what? Two-color illustrations
The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
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Review
“This is a comic book with zest and brains---and it just might help a reader understand the brave new world.” (New Yorker )
“Starred Review. Though the graphic format employed here is often playful and always reader friendly, this analysis of contemporary journalism is as incisive as it is entertaining, while offering a lesson on good citizenship through savvy media consumption….While some may see a sign of bias in the author’s own media affiliation, this historical analysis of how and why media and society shape each other should prove illuminating for general readers and media practitioners alike.” (Kirkus Reviews )
“Think Art Spiegelman meets Marshall McLuhan.” (Leon Neyfakh - New York Observer )
“...The Influencing Machine is an original work, a highly researched yet highly accessible survey of all things media—from the history of media/journalism beginning in ancient Rome through the Mayan scribes to the First Amendment press freedoms of the U.S. Constitution and beyond—and how the media's mission and its means have advanced through history.” (Calvin Reid - Publishers Weekly )
“The Influencing Machine is an indispensable guidebook for anyone who hopes to navigate the mirages and constantly shifting sands of our media landscape. Brooke Gladstone’s text and Josh Neufeld’s images illuminate one another with crackling wit and intelligence.” (Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home )
“Like Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis or Michael Pollan, Brooke somehow takes a subject most of us don’t give a damn about and makes it completely entertaining.” (Ira Glass, host of This American Life )
“A first-rate comics manifesto. The Influencing Machine has influenced me to think much more deeply about the media landscape live in. Gladstone and Neufeld can show and tell with the best of ‘em.” (Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics )
“Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine is so remarkable that it is hard to describe. The best I can do is: it’s a book about the history and current controversies of the media, all done as a Spiegelman-style comic-strip narrative. Brooke herself (or at least an avatar) leads you through it all, and her ‘voice’—well known after her years as host of NPR’s On the Media—comes through loud and clear, thanks to Josh Neufeld's witty drawings. I learned a lot, including a lot that I should have known already, and enjoyed every minute.” (Michael Kinsley, author of Please Don't Remain Calm )
“Starred Review. Though the graphic format employed here is often playful and always reader friendly, this analysis of contemporary journalism is as incisive as it is entertaining, while offering a lesson on good citizenship through savvy media consumption….While some may see a sign of bias in the author’s own media affiliation, this historical analysis of how and why media and society shape each other should prove illuminating for general readers and media practitioners alike.” (Kirkus Reviews )
“Think Art Spiegelman meets Marshall McLuhan.” (Leon Neyfakh - New York Observer )
“...The Influencing Machine is an original work, a highly researched yet highly accessible survey of all things media—from the history of media/journalism beginning in ancient Rome through the Mayan scribes to the First Amendment press freedoms of the U.S. Constitution and beyond—and how the media's mission and its means have advanced through history.” (Calvin Reid - Publishers Weekly )
“The Influencing Machine is an indispensable guidebook for anyone who hopes to navigate the mirages and constantly shifting sands of our media landscape. Brooke Gladstone’s text and Josh Neufeld’s images illuminate one another with crackling wit and intelligence.” (Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home )
“Like Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis or Michael Pollan, Brooke somehow takes a subject most of us don’t give a damn about and makes it completely entertaining.” (Ira Glass, host of This American Life )
“A first-rate comics manifesto. The Influencing Machine has influenced me to think much more deeply about the media landscape live in. Gladstone and Neufeld can show and tell with the best of ‘em.” (Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics )
“Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine is so remarkable that it is hard to describe. The best I can do is: it’s a book about the history and current controversies of the media, all done as a Spiegelman-style comic-strip narrative. Brooke herself (or at least an avatar) leads you through it all, and her ‘voice’—well known after her years as host of NPR’s On the Media—comes through loud and clear, thanks to Josh Neufeld's witty drawings. I learned a lot, including a lot that I should have known already, and enjoyed every minute.” (Michael Kinsley, author of Please Don't Remain Calm )
About the Author
Brooke Gladstone is cohost of NPR’s On the Media and former senior editor of All Things Considered. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Josh Neufeld is the author of the New York Times bestseller A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge and A Few Perfect Hours. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Josh Neufeld is the author of the New York Times bestseller A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge and A Few Perfect Hours. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
"We get the media we deserve," declares NPR's Brooke Gladstone in her excellent The Influencing Machine, an insightful graphic manifesto that sits comfortably alongside Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Vintage), both of whom make cameo appearances.
Gladstone, aided by Josh Neufeld's seamless visuals, makes a compelling case that the ills that plague media today -- mass and social -- are nothing new, that "we've been here before: the incivility, the inanities, the obsessions, the broken business models. In fact, it's been far worse and the Republic survives."
What follows is a broad, contextual overview of the history of media, recounted with a healthy sense of humor, and a refreshing undertone of optimism. eg: Near the end of the book, in two pages, she covers Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, Lanier's skepticism, Planet of the Apes and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs... and it all makes sense!
"Graphic non-fiction" is a tricky format to pull off and not to everyone's taste, but Neufeld does a great job complementing Gladstone without letting the medium overshadow her message, and any student of media, formally or arm-chair, should read The Influencing Machine without hesitation.
Kudos to W.W. Norton for taking a chance on such an innovative book, though it's rather disappointing that the publisher of Frank Rose's excellent The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories has zero online presence for it. A missed opportunity, but one that should be easily (and quickly) rectified.
Gladstone, aided by Josh Neufeld's seamless visuals, makes a compelling case that the ills that plague media today -- mass and social -- are nothing new, that "we've been here before: the incivility, the inanities, the obsessions, the broken business models. In fact, it's been far worse and the Republic survives."
What follows is a broad, contextual overview of the history of media, recounted with a healthy sense of humor, and a refreshing undertone of optimism. eg: Near the end of the book, in two pages, she covers Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, Lanier's skepticism, Planet of the Apes and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs... and it all makes sense!
"Graphic non-fiction" is a tricky format to pull off and not to everyone's taste, but Neufeld does a great job complementing Gladstone without letting the medium overshadow her message, and any student of media, formally or arm-chair, should read The Influencing Machine without hesitation.
Kudos to W.W. Norton for taking a chance on such an innovative book, though it's rather disappointing that the publisher of Frank Rose's excellent The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories has zero online presence for it. A missed opportunity, but one that should be easily (and quickly) rectified.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
"We get the media we deserve."
That's the simple premise that NPR's Brooke Gladstone and artist (not "illustrator"--this is comics after all) Josh Neufeld defend in a variety of often brilliant and always thought-provoking ways over the course of The Influencing Machine. The title itself, while intriguing and central to Gladstone's message, is somewhat deceptive: If you knew nothing about this information-packed yet highly readable work of graphic nonfiction, you might think it's a polemic about today's corrupt media cabal and the scary manner in which it manipulates the public. On the contrary, if anything, it's a polemic against those who hold such beliefs.
Of course, not all people, under every political system and throughout history, have gotten the media they deserve. Indeed, that's probably a point that the historically minded Gladstone would concede. Still, her book makes a convincing argument that in today's late-capitalism democracies, the consumer-driven media publishers are just that: driven by consumers. It's a truism that's easy to lose sight of, especially in its implications, so it's good that Gladstone is so persuasive when remarking that "when we see ourselves distorted in the media mirror, we should probably consider that some of what we see is actually us." But that's not all. She's also able to see the situation in far greater complexity and sum it up in language that instantly strikes with the force of aphoristic truth: "The media landscape is so cluttered with mirrors facing mirrors that we can't tell where an image begins or ends."
Analysis at this depth effectively renders the "Is the media biased toward the left?" question not exactly moot, but just far less compelling than perhaps it had been. And it's in this manner that Gladstone's work is very much in keeping with current thinking in the field of media literacy: All media products are inherently biased, so as the audience it's our duty simply to identify these biases as they reveal themselves. Gladstone, however, addresses the question of bias by pulling back to the 50,000-foot level and positioning the "boring" controversy about "political bias" alongside the far less obvious biases that we really "should worry about"--commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias, narrative bias, and, most iconoclastically, fairness bias. All of these are covered in a nine-page section that feels like it comprises the most valuable takeaways in a book full of gems. In short, if for some reason you can't purchase The Influencing Machine or find any copies at your local library, then you should at least pull it off a bookstore shelf and read it for a few minutes starting on page 62.
Of course, the main reason the book flows so well and delivers its ideas so efficiently is related to Neufeld's contributions. Avoiding the easy laughs achieved by outlandish caricatures of historical figures, Neufeld likewise achieves an approach to storytelling that's always smart but never descends into mere (and annoying) cleverness. Employing an understated style that doesn't try to draw attention to itself but instead always works in concert with his collaborator's prose, he helps create what is a truly multimodal text with the artwork working on a parallel, if clearly complementary, track to the print--hence the objection to the "illustrated by Josh Neufeld" byline. Certainly all the research and original analysis are Gladstone's to claim...and recognition of this is amply provided by the book's "branding" subtitle ("Brooke Gladstone on the Media") and her appearance as narrator on nearly every page.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it's also Neufeld's engaging visual explication of its ideas that make the book so accessible to what is potentially a wide range of audiences. In fact, in an interview with GraphicNovelReporter, Gladstone remarked that she'd like to see teachers assign The Influencing Machine to their students to read. Certainly the book has great promise in terms of curriculum, but one wishes it hadn't undermined itself regarding high school application by including profanity that could have been avoided and imagery that might make it a tough sell in some classrooms (e.g., a baby is bayoneted in silhouette, a dog sniffs another's derrière)--nothing that an adult readership is likely to be overly offended by, only disturbed or amused as the case might be.
So here's some advice for those who support enhancing news literacy in our culture: Read the book yourself, then buy a copy for the teens and educators you know who need to read it. That is, don't wait for the powers that be to approve its content and put in a mass order for the title. Instead, circumvent the system while also alerting individual readers to any "objectionable" content, as rare as it may be. If nothing else, such a strategy would align nicely with The Influencing Machine's main thesis: We need to be aware of our own media choices and take responsibility for the ramifications--and problematic aspects--of those choices...because in the end, we're the ones who influence the production and dissemination of media messages.
-- Peter Gutiérrez
That's the simple premise that NPR's Brooke Gladstone and artist (not "illustrator"--this is comics after all) Josh Neufeld defend in a variety of often brilliant and always thought-provoking ways over the course of The Influencing Machine. The title itself, while intriguing and central to Gladstone's message, is somewhat deceptive: If you knew nothing about this information-packed yet highly readable work of graphic nonfiction, you might think it's a polemic about today's corrupt media cabal and the scary manner in which it manipulates the public. On the contrary, if anything, it's a polemic against those who hold such beliefs.
Of course, not all people, under every political system and throughout history, have gotten the media they deserve. Indeed, that's probably a point that the historically minded Gladstone would concede. Still, her book makes a convincing argument that in today's late-capitalism democracies, the consumer-driven media publishers are just that: driven by consumers. It's a truism that's easy to lose sight of, especially in its implications, so it's good that Gladstone is so persuasive when remarking that "when we see ourselves distorted in the media mirror, we should probably consider that some of what we see is actually us." But that's not all. She's also able to see the situation in far greater complexity and sum it up in language that instantly strikes with the force of aphoristic truth: "The media landscape is so cluttered with mirrors facing mirrors that we can't tell where an image begins or ends."
Analysis at this depth effectively renders the "Is the media biased toward the left?" question not exactly moot, but just far less compelling than perhaps it had been. And it's in this manner that Gladstone's work is very much in keeping with current thinking in the field of media literacy: All media products are inherently biased, so as the audience it's our duty simply to identify these biases as they reveal themselves. Gladstone, however, addresses the question of bias by pulling back to the 50,000-foot level and positioning the "boring" controversy about "political bias" alongside the far less obvious biases that we really "should worry about"--commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias, narrative bias, and, most iconoclastically, fairness bias. All of these are covered in a nine-page section that feels like it comprises the most valuable takeaways in a book full of gems. In short, if for some reason you can't purchase The Influencing Machine or find any copies at your local library, then you should at least pull it off a bookstore shelf and read it for a few minutes starting on page 62.
Of course, the main reason the book flows so well and delivers its ideas so efficiently is related to Neufeld's contributions. Avoiding the easy laughs achieved by outlandish caricatures of historical figures, Neufeld likewise achieves an approach to storytelling that's always smart but never descends into mere (and annoying) cleverness. Employing an understated style that doesn't try to draw attention to itself but instead always works in concert with his collaborator's prose, he helps create what is a truly multimodal text with the artwork working on a parallel, if clearly complementary, track to the print--hence the objection to the "illustrated by Josh Neufeld" byline. Certainly all the research and original analysis are Gladstone's to claim...and recognition of this is amply provided by the book's "branding" subtitle ("Brooke Gladstone on the Media") and her appearance as narrator on nearly every page.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it's also Neufeld's engaging visual explication of its ideas that make the book so accessible to what is potentially a wide range of audiences. In fact, in an interview with GraphicNovelReporter, Gladstone remarked that she'd like to see teachers assign The Influencing Machine to their students to read. Certainly the book has great promise in terms of curriculum, but one wishes it hadn't undermined itself regarding high school application by including profanity that could have been avoided and imagery that might make it a tough sell in some classrooms (e.g., a baby is bayoneted in silhouette, a dog sniffs another's derrière)--nothing that an adult readership is likely to be overly offended by, only disturbed or amused as the case might be.
So here's some advice for those who support enhancing news literacy in our culture: Read the book yourself, then buy a copy for the teens and educators you know who need to read it. That is, don't wait for the powers that be to approve its content and put in a mass order for the title. Instead, circumvent the system while also alerting individual readers to any "objectionable" content, as rare as it may be. If nothing else, such a strategy would align nicely with The Influencing Machine's main thesis: We need to be aware of our own media choices and take responsibility for the ramifications--and problematic aspects--of those choices...because in the end, we're the ones who influence the production and dissemination of media messages.
-- Peter Gutiérrez
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
It's easy to look at the media organizations in the US these days and fear that they are worse than they've ever been. This book reassuringly recounts how biased, slanted, and lying media have always been a part of our culture. The messages are delivered faster and constantly now, but truth, distortions, and lies have always coexisted.
The book covers the history of the media in the United States, from Thomas Paine's pamphlets to today's internet spam and cable news. It describes how the media have changed over time, sometimes influencing our society, and sometimes responding to how society has changed. It also presents some interesting research about how we respond to media and how we determine which of it to believe.
The graphic (aka comic book) form of this book made it very easy and entertaining to read. It was easy to put down and pick up again. The cartoon panels were an effective way to present historical anecdotes clearly.
Regular listeners of Brooke's excellent radio program will find some familiar material here, but there's more as well. I heartily recommend this book.
The book covers the history of the media in the United States, from Thomas Paine's pamphlets to today's internet spam and cable news. It describes how the media have changed over time, sometimes influencing our society, and sometimes responding to how society has changed. It also presents some interesting research about how we respond to media and how we determine which of it to believe.
The graphic (aka comic book) form of this book made it very easy and entertaining to read. It was easy to put down and pick up again. The cartoon panels were an effective way to present historical anecdotes clearly.
Regular listeners of Brooke's excellent radio program will find some familiar material here, but there's more as well. I heartily recommend this book.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
very ilustrative, a little short
a lightweight essay about the reality of mass media and its biases, as with every graphic novel, it could be a little longer
Published 1 month ago by Enrique Padilla
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brooke Gladstone - Influencing Machine
Very interesting, entertaining and worth reading. Buy this book if you're interested in a candid discussion of the media and its challenges in the era of scepticism, incivility... Read more
Published 2 months ago by KSherman
1.0 out of 5 stars
Book sucks!
I needed to this book for college. It was the freshmens reading assignment. I have no idea why they chose this book. Read more
Published 5 months ago by wink5845
4.0 out of 5 stars
When the Truth is Found to be a Lie
The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone
Brooke Gladstone is the managing editor of "On the Media" for NPR and has been a reporter. Read more
Brooke Gladstone is the managing editor of "On the Media" for NPR and has been a reporter. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Acute Observer
4.0 out of 5 stars
When the Truth is Found to be a Lie
The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone
Brooke Gladstone is the managing editor of "On the Media" for NPR and has been a reporter. Read more
Brooke Gladstone is the managing editor of "On the Media" for NPR and has been a reporter. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Acute Observer
4.0 out of 5 stars
entertaining way to learn about what drives the news media
I always enjoy listening to Brooke Gladstone's show, On the Media, because it provides a lot of insight into the way news is produced and shaped and distributed in the era of the... Read more
Published 6 months ago by VAH
4.0 out of 5 stars
We define the media, thus the media defines us
In this engaging & thought provoking graphic non-fiction novel Brooke Gladstone aims to dismantle the idea that media is an evil, disembodied influencing machine that controls our... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Christine
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed
Ending on the note "We get the media we deserve". A safe cliche, with religious resonances perhaps. What does it mean? Do the North Koreans get the media they deserve? Read more
Published 10 months ago by Hal Morris
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, but sucked on a Kindle
Must admit, being on the other side of the world and, er, not American, I hadn't heard of Brooke Gladstone, but the recommendation from the Brain Picking blog was enough to tell me... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Our Man in Abiko
4.0 out of 5 stars
Responsible, but gutless
This is a fun read, full of good information. But Brooke is Chomsky with no cojones. The power of money and advertising really get short shrift. Read more
Published 12 months ago by J. S. Dodds
